Friday, June 26, 2009

She imagines Carlisle in a wheelchair. One of her friends in Minnesota said, “Is he in a wheelchair? Is that why you aren’t talking? Is he old and in a wheel chair?”

Mill imagines him in a wheelchair; she imagines him standing miraculously to touch her hair. She imagines him old and miraculously turning fifty. She imagines the denouement.

“Come up and see me sometime,” she drawls. “Is that a pistol in your pants or are you just happy to see me?”

When the doorman rings, Mill remembers Carlisle can read her thoughts. “Let him up,” Mill says. She is wearing an African kaftan and briefs and a bra under it. She is glad her legs are waxed, her hair and nails are fresh. She slips on flat sandals and pulls a brush through her hair. She douses herself with Dior, leaves the door ajar, and waits.

Carlisle steps in to the apartment as if he were there to build it, mysteriously raising his foot as if stepping over a stone fence. He is wearing a black suit and hat.

Mill blushes as if she has nothing to hide.

“Come here,” Carlisle says. He locks his fingers behind her neck and pulls her to his mouth. They fall into a bookshelf. “You’re not getting out of this.”

“It isn’t in the dictionary,” she says after a pause. “It was a science fiction novel and film. The census is next year and the winter Olympics in Vancouver.”

“Twenty-ten will be a good year,” he says.

“Everyone is hoping,” she says. “People say this was a bad decade due to the War.”

“Obama won,” Carlisle says.

“Yes,” she says, “Obama will be President in twenty-ten.”

“Miss Mill will be Mrs. Carlisle,” he says.

“You borrow trouble,” she says.

“I eschew borrowing,” he says. “It’s a fair topic.”

“We’re not equals,” she says.

“Look it up,” he says.

“Es-choo,” she says, “sounds like a sneeze. I prefer es-skew, but it isn’t listed. It comes from old German meaning shy.”

“We are equal under the law,” he says.

“Equal in legal contexts,” she says. “Otherwise it means identical.”

“You're sure?” he says.

“That is what it says right here,” she says.

“I thought I would call my lawyer,” he says. “You call your lawyer, and we’ll sit down and hash it out and come up with a prudent agreement.”

“I never wanted a big church wedding,” Mill says. “I lost my belief in God early. It was like losing my virginity by falling off a bike or horse; I lost connection with God when I hit the ground. I got back on the bike or horse and rode away, but I was godless.”

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

She speaks to her mother on Tuesdays, but today her mother is in Eau Claire with her garden journey group.

Her mother knows that Mill has met Carlisle in person, but certain others in Minnesota suspect that she has never even seen him. They quiz her during return trips on his appearance: Is he tall, broad, handsome, good-natured, good-looking, older, younger, available?

"He's my boss," she says, or "he is he," when cornered.

Carlisle asks for discretion in relating details of her position to anyone except her mother, whom he has judged (without meeting) to be of the older generation, from the set who survived the Great Depression and World Wars, who preserves homegrown tomatoes, who is old school. Mrs. Mill is all that, and she is also a modern.

Mill misses the wildlife of her home in Wayzata: the rabbits at the birdfeeder, the deer in the woods, the gardens and wild leeks. She misses the moths and butterflies, the frogs that climb and toads that crawl. She misses Tilly Artaud, an American toad who sat at Mill's glass door every midnight for a summer, as if she had swallowed a Timex watch battery. She misses her cat, The Doctor: his bushy gray tail and Roman nose, his pacing the hallways at night as if carrying transcripts of her speeches to Congress.

Carlisle has urged her to get a dog to walk in the morning. If she gets a dog, his name will be "Johannes." If she doesn't get one, she'll consider a bird.

Monday, June 22, 2009

“It’s an alternate spelling,” Mill says, feeling apologetic for her one-more syllable, as when she says real-a-tor and Viag-a-ra. “I saw Niagara when I was three,” she says.

“Three is too young,” Carlisle says.

“I was in high school when the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass -- the Supreme Court said then that women are ‘people’ under the Constitution -- a lot of people were listening,” Mill says. “I thought it meant I would become an ‘adult person’ not a ‘woman.’ All we got was ‘privacy’ amid street protests and religious cantilevering over abortion.”

Mill lives graciously without love in the 00s. A student of modernism, the 80s were her 20s, the 90s her 30s, the auts her 40s.

Her lifetime is an odometer reset to zero. She is a car parked at auction, an antique or classic, not a roadster. She is a beauty restored to a season, not a hot virgin or spinster, but an old maid with a lesbian’s timing. Bidders ignore her or come in low.

There was an ice storm not a hurricane when she lived in Texas.

Men gently used her to make love without commitment in her 20s. In her 30s, the men were more vigorous, and she once called the police, believing police were the bureau to care; the policemen stood at her apartment door with sheepish blue eyes and bulges at the hip. She hoped no one would fire a gun. One of the officers said, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” while the man most presumed innocent by the jury said, “Don’t lie to the officers.” Mill thanked them; the next day she resigned her job and packed suitcases and boxes for Minnesota. The men were all cowards, Mrs. Mill said, and, “Justice has been served.”

“It’s a lunatic asylum in there,” he says. Mill’s ancestors were more stable than Carlisle’s.

“The market is down,” he says, but that's not why he's calling. "Are you sitting down?” Then, as is his custom, Carlisle reads the Times obituaries page to her.

“It’s curtains for Curtin,” he summarizes before reading the text. “Scholar of the slave trade dead at 87.”

“Bogle bit it,” he says.

“Founder of Vanguard?” Mill asks.

“Bob of the Ventures,” he says. “You’re too young to remember Hawaii Five-0.”

“I am not!” Mill protests foolishly, tired of hearing him say she is too young to remember things. “I washed dishes to it.”

Mill learns more about life from Carlisle’s daily slog through the obituaries than she likes to admit. She pretends to an estranged discomfort at the thought or mention of death -- shudders on cue at it -- but she is in fact glad that people die: and not only people but all living things. Mortality is the universal sign that democracy exists outside its documents, that it has a natural basis, she thinks.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

It was Mill’s dumb luck that Carlisle’s favorite president was Jimmy Carter. At least, that’s what he said when he phoned her mother’s house in Wayzata. That and his mother had grown up in St. Paul.

His mother’s father had given him a dictionary that had belonged to Mark Twain. The dictionary was signed by Twain and lying in a safety deposit box in Connecticut. Carlisle had read it in its entirety the summer after boarding school.

Carlisle told her he was glad that a Minnesota gal had answered the ad, and, “not just any farm-fed," he said, "but a gal with English and a little economics under her belt.”

“We belong together,” he said that first phone call, “as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle.”

“I read an article about their fire in The New Yorker,” Mill acknowledged.

“The New Yorker delivers out in Wayzata?” Carlisle said.

“Their subscription center is in Red Oak, Iowa,” Mill said.

“Boone,” Carlisle corrected her.

As a child, another child had called Mill “Little Miss Know-It-All” and “nigger lips” on the same day. That child was a woman by then, a divorcing and foreclosed woman with two children and a married black lover.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Mill attended the University of Minnesota in the 1980s. She majored in English. One of her friends from childhood, Nancy O’Reilly, acted as if she had outgrown Mill by college. Mill saw Nancy O’Reilly days in Coffman Union reading psycholinguistics textbooks. Mill sat tables away reading Donne or Pope or Dryden or Swift but not the Romantics. Mill knew her own heart too little, the result of having a formal mother. If Nancy O’Reilly had stayed her friend, if their intellects had banded together, Mill might have realized she wanted a career in banking.

Had she realized she wanted a career in banking, she might have met her husband. Had she met her husband, she might have had children. Mill became an office worker with progressive responsibilities and static paycheck, and Nancy O’Reilly went on to earn a Ph.D. in linguistics. Mrs. Mill got a thank you note from Mrs. O’Reilly after Nancy O’Reilly had become Nancy O’Reilly-Kemp, though Nancy O’Reilly hadn’t invited Mill to the wedding. Later Mrs. Mill learned from Mrs. O’Reilly at the grocery store the O’Reilly-Kemps had two children.

Mill wrote, “Bookkeeping is to the Romantics as Teheran is to Carter,” and sent it to Carlisle’s blind box ad.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Mill pans the indices for gold. “One ’roid or two?” plays in her mind like a strain from a musical. Couple of street paranoids, it says. “’Zat one ’noid or two?” she rehearses. “When ’noids talk, money listens.”

One male ape to another: “Is that a butt or a breastplate through the trees?”

The phone rings: Carlisle.

“What is O-I-D?” Mill says.

“Oxford Indiana Dictionary,” he says.

“The suffix is from Greek,” Mill says, “and means ‘like, resembling, or related to’ from eidos: form or shape.”

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The rain changes the shapes of trees. It changes the buildings, though not, she thinks, this building. This building stays dry and firm. Mill takes out her magnifying glass and begins to harvest statistics.

The telephone rings: Carlisle.

“Hello,” Mill says.

“You want to know how bad it is?” he says.

“It doesn’t look all bad,” she says.

“It’s a black cloud over a picnic before it rains. It’s a jammed pistol. It’s a dictionary with half the letters removed.”

“It’s a tornado that hits your barn not your house,” Mill says as he hangs up.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

In the morning Mill arrives at Carlisle’s suite with Post in hand. The Post lies ravaged on the empty desk. Her chair is parked in the center of the room, wheels askew. (She leaves it neatly positioned under her desk with its wheels pointed toward the wall.) The spare chair is in its usual position tucked under the empty desk. She inclines it toward her desk then straightens the wheels of her chair by sliding it along the lines in the Persian rug and sits.

The telephone rings: Señor Carlisle.

“Hello,” Señorita Mill pretends not to know.

“See page 7,” he says.

Mill opens the clean copy of the Post to page 7. “Baseball topper,” she reads, “tests plus for ’roids.”

“ ’Zat one ’roid or two?” Carlisle says.

“The article doesn’t go into it,” Mill says.

“Spell hemorrhoid,” Carlisle says.

“H-e-m-m,” Mill says.

“Look it up,” he says.

Mill wakes the computer. “H-e-m-o-r-r-h-o-i-d,” she says.

“Baseball topper’s ’hoids test-us,” Carlisle proffers.

“Calumny,” Mill says, flanking her hair.

Carlisle is silent.

“I hired you to follow stock reports,” he says. “I keep you because you know the word ‘calumny.’ Read the definition.”

Mill toggles the mouse, “1. defamation: the making of false statements about somebody with malicious intent
2. defamatory statement: a slanderous statement or false accusation

“15th century. From Latin calumnia or false accusation (also the source of English challenge), from calvi ‘to deceive.’"

Monday, June 15, 2009

Mill knits Carlisle a pullover evenings. The pullover is dark brown with a beige v- at the neck and stripe at the cuff. Carlisle does not deserve a pullover. Carlisle deserves a lump in the head for his incessant phone calls and demands. A man ought to buy his own newspaper, she thinks, ought to buy his aunt a birthday card. He ought to move his chaise longue and see to it when he needs towels. Carlisle hired her to keep books, yet the labor is indivisible. She feels indentured, not like a service worker. The service workers have position and pride. She has no pride. She has little pride. Carlisle's idea of service would shape a Founding Father. Smoke rises from her tender temple. She puts on water for tea.

"It's nothing," Mill says. He can read her thoughts after hours, when all the shops are closed. He can read her thoughts at a distance of city blocks. He can read her thoughts over the din of books on the bedside table. He can read thoughts she filters with J. S. Bach.

Friday, June 12, 2009

She lifts the bag of groceries over the counter. “Good noon, Umberto. This is for Mr. Carlisle.”

“You’re not going up?”

“I have rounds,” she says.

“What do I tell him?”

“That I have rounds.”

Umberto stares at her hopefully.

“Errands,” she says.

“Work for Mr. Carlisle?”

“Yes,” she says.

“I’ll tell him. Good afternoon, Miss Mill.”

“Goodbye, Umberto.”

Mill passes Il Cantinori on her way to University Place. Its french doors are open, and lunchers sit at tables half inside, half outside, sipping wine and eating dull bread.

At Devonshire Optical, the bell klingels as she opens the door. She fishes in her red wallet for her prescription. She wants green frames. She peers through the cases. There is one green pair. The clerk lets her try them on, but they do not suit her face. She sees a light brown pair.

“These,” she says to the clerk. The clerk sits with her at a fitting table to take adjustments then writes her name and address and telephone number on an index card.

“We’ll call when they’re ready,” the clerk says.

“I’ll wear these until then,” Mill says. Mill paid $3 on Minnesota Care for the wire pair. In Minnesota, she wears them for driving and at the theater. In the city she wears them to see to the end of the block and discern faces on Law & Order. Carlisle told her to get new ones.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Mill takes her assignment and heads with it toward Broadway to walk past the windows of discount shoes. She thinks Carlisle lives in the Shoe Box District, but she hasn’t said it. She asked for leave to visit a club in the Meat Packing District, and Carlisle said he’d send her to the Diamond District if she wasn’t careful. She imagined riding the subway alone to the Diamond District to size her engagement ring, but nothing came of it besides banter about the burden of money. “The Statue of Liberty is the color of money,” he told her on a Saturday. Apples at the Farmers’ Market are the color of dairy barns not green. Carlisle means “Granny Smiths” from New Zealand.

Mill picks the firmest green apples from the bin at Modern Gourmet. The deli is out of the Post, so she buys Raisin Bran as a joke at her expense. The shopkeepers are not fluent in the vocabulary of groceries: Motrin for margarine. All the service workers are fluent in the ways to pay. Currency is universal. The owner’s wife takes her dollars and returns her change. Mill puts the coins in her pocket to give to the man outside.

One blade of the ceiling fan flew off the base. (10)He loved me last century. (5)It blew him back and singed his eyelashes to light the oven. (12)I loved his face in profile. (6)I loved him from two barstools. (6)Irish bar, Irish ale, Irish jukebox. (6)I loved you over the phone. (6)Your books are old for men younger then. (8)My books are for friends. (5)There are books yet to read inside me. (8)One of them is Der Zauberberg. (6)Final words: “Am I facing uptown or downtown?” (8)

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Saga Lundberg checked her Facebook home page: Eleven eligible men advertising singleness -- “for the whole world to see” -- were not behind the times, were networking. Mistake in perception: married men on Facebook were not seeking out dames as well. Dames herselves were seeking? Connubial bliss. As described on Oprah. It begins in the perfect pair of blue jeans and moves from there to perfect abs. Perfect abs lead to the sunny sport of one-ups-man-ship: grabbing abs and opportunities. Manship is not a word in the dictionary of this word processor, but Facebook, capitalized, is. One-ups-man-ship desvío del saco. To be Serena Williams in tennis; to be Saga Lundberg in love. Saga -- who might believe the What Is Your Swedish Name? application might name a short story writer Saga? Believability the first yardstick in prejudicing us for make-believes.

140 words in previous sudden paragraph that dips you uppity into real life -- a slice of life. A slice of Saga Lundberg's life is a slab of gingerbread served thick with fresh whipped cream. “Gingerbread” reveals more about her than do her Facebook practices. In practice, she visits Facebook daily while trying to keep a low profile. She dusts her tracks. She limits access. If her Facebook friends were to visit in real life, she would not lose a day to loneliness. An endless roll of traipsers would come at odd hours to her living room, where she’d set a rug to wipe their feet: people she’d pick up at the airport from Ireland, Germany, the UK. They’d dine at nearby McCoy’s Public House. They’d politically digress.

Eloise picked her favorite pair of blue jeans; a long-torsoed embroidered white blouse with satin blue ribbon; a delicate pale pink and white underwire bra and panty set; and matte royal blue low-heeled pumps. She assembled herself without difficulty and threaded the jeans with a narrow alligator belt. Voila!

Her clear, smooth skin was too pure to need make-up, yet everyday she hesitated near the mirror: There were people who rejected a woman’s face unless it was camouflaged. She wore mascara and as with her fetish for shoes and boots, she fetishized mascara colors, what few there were. Navy blue Chanel, she selected. Sheer plum lipgloss to vaunt her pearly whites.

Eloise’s hair was in arrears. It was brave straw sprouting from a vase. Her forebears had owned slaves.

Friday, June 05, 2009

As far as I was concerned, she had done it. Her foot had done it. Her right foot, to be exact, had not coordinated with her eye movements in time to avoid hitting the lady. A sin of omission, an error in haste.

All this talk of “woman” “man” “man” “woman” “lady” “girl.” At death crossing an intersection, do you want to go out as a lady, spread flat against the curb, hit by a lady driver in her 40s -- not a very young lady -- or do you want to die a woman? “Hey, lady, you just hit a woman, killed her.”

The lady who died was old. Relatives on both sides of the story say it was no one’s fault. The lady driving didn't care deep down: Her kids had not been in the car, but her mother had been there, her mother before suddenly developing Alzheimer’s and moving to a home. Poof! Esther’s crossing-the-street dead! No blame nor cause for a civil suit: an innocent taking of burdens off the street one burden at a time.

Belinda’s darned for money, strapped, house full of renovations, nannies to pay and kids in private school.

I bring up the death because though Belinda did it, she is not quick to forgive. I haven’t hit so much as a squirrel.

There were breaches of etiquette in her first marriage; her first husband took a piss on a bush outside a museum. The children were watching, the boy and the baby. Her second husband is “ordinary” but decent, lets Harry pay.

No need to pay for the accident because it didn’t happen “that way.” The cel phone didn’t do it. Her foot didn’t do it. Her foot didn’t fall.

"Bless everyone mentioned in every news story, no matter where they stand or what they do. For what we bless is delivered to divine right order. Bless those who do harm as well as those who do good, for any judgment blocks the light and keeps miracles at bay. Becoming emotionally reactive when we are confronted with darkness only serves to keep the darkness alive. Reacting with fear merely feeds the fear."-- Marianne Williamson

Thursday, June 04, 2009

In the um. In the, um, beginning. The, uh, founder of wide-margined porous-prose steel prospective mother. Counsel. In the beginning, before the beginning, until the end, she, headstrong, rose clairvoyant into the next. Stomach. Surprise. Etwas auf Deutsch gesagt würde. Strumming heels. Fixed Parkinson’s. Herr Drueder saw her at Caribou. Saw her at Starbuck’s because there were no Caribou's in Texas that I saw. He saw her at Starbuck’s, but I would rather that he’d seen her at Dunkin’ Donuts. I don’t remember whether there were Dunkin’ Donuts in Texas. There is one in New York, across First Avenue from Beth Israel Hospital. I fell for the advertising. I did not buy a donut, but I bought the famous coffee after learning it was famous. There are cups more famous than that at Dunkin’ Donuts. I bought two cups and had no way to carry them with my umbrella extended, so it rained. I had vertigo. Crossing the Avenue with vertigo was as anxiety-provoking as if I had been crossing against the light without vertigo. I feared collapse midway. I feared that my legs would give out under me, and I’d fall to the pavement and that help would not arrive before the light changed and the cars moved. I stop typing to put a latex glove on the right hand with which to eat cheese curls. I lick the glove clean, remember chewing popped balloons like bubblegum, and resume typing the story. Tell it in nine words. Lazy.

Monday, June 01, 2009

Try to write a short story. The first line of the short story is about trying to write a short story. Trying to write a short story is like trying to type a letter for a secretary who could type her own letters, but since she is an administrative assistant, the agency pays me to do her clerical work. She will not file. They trust me to file for her. She consults files when she has a question, a question that derives from her own intelligence. Probably she has a bachelor’s degree. I have a master’s degree. She wears a navy skirted suit. I wear a navy skirt and white floral blouse. I am not to use my intelligence, my autonomy, my independent sense of what has value and meaning or my sense of license in writing. The agency does not pay for my health insurance. The law firm pays for hers. The old barrister (her boss) comes in at eleven or one. He smiles at me knowing all too well. The summer intern, who sits on my desk (once), sniffs me out as a lay then is told that I finished graduate school and am technically, get off the desk. I am peripherally his senior, except that law (his field) has more clout, more entity, more finality than mine, though mine was a terminal degree. I type for her. He barely notices her. He notices her. He is to treat her equally, as with respect, but he is to treat me for one hopeful morning as a prospective lay. I tell him that I’m engaged to take the pressure off these other hierarchies, to relate. I would only type for him if they asked. I aspire to work as an old school secretary directly for the barrister, but no such luck.